Colonial decision documents filtered through tiers with divergent institutional assessments

Evidence

Many of the documents I work with here are those the Binnenlandsch Bestuur generated and sent on to the Governor-General, who in turn conveyed them to the Minister of Colonies. The Raad van Indië, the elite advisory board to the Governor-General, often emerges with a premier role in making decisions that the Governor-General on his own could or would not. Events in Deli also take us into the relationships between the Dutch military corps and the civil service through correspondence that underscores how divergent were their assessments of danger and how poor and haphazard their communications were. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 107

Categorization

• XREF: The civil-military divergence and poor communication parallels similar material in the later Deli/Aceh colonial historiography and the study of ‘colonial knowledge’ circuits.